Janessa Valle, 4, takes remaining snow and tries to build a small snowman in front of her home in the Sun Valley Homes public housing site in west Denver.

A view down West Colfax Avenue toward downtown Denver from the Sun Valley neighborhood, between Federal Boulevard and the South Platte River. A sweeping land-use plan, if approved by City Council, soon will transform the area.

Colorado’s poorest neighborhood is about to take a step toward a transformation that officials hope will lift up the impoverished residents, help connect them to the rest of the city and turn the area into one of Denver’s jewels.

The Sun Valley neighborhood on Denver’s west side sits near Sports Authority Field between Federal Boulevard and the South Platte River. Ninety percent of its 1,500 residents live in subsidized housing, where the median household income is only $8,000 a year.

Change is coming to the area next week with the debut of the West Light Rail line. On Monday, the Denver City Council is expected to approve a sweeping land use plan that officials hope will foster a radical metamorphosis.

The Decatur-Federal Station Area Plan is a high-level vision for how the area a half-mile around the light rail station should develop in the years to come. It foresees high-quality housing for both the poor and middle class, a riverfront park, streets that connect to downtown and a new entertainment and cultural area around the Broncos stadium.

“I am just as excited about the potential of this area as I am for the area around the (National Western) Stock Show,” Denver Mayor Michael Hancock said. “This is going to be transformational for an area that has been written off for so long.”

The effort to make over the neighborhood started a decade ago with city officials wondering how they could fix an area that had become home to the poorest people in Denver.

That effort got more attention once a light rail station was planned near the neighborhood. To guide the expected development around the station, city planners went to work with the Denver Housing Authority to craft a neighborhood plan that wouldn’t leave the low-income residents out of the process.

In 2009, the first draft was scrapped when the Denver Housing Authority said it wasn’t comprehensive enough. A 2011 federal grant paid for another try, and officials spent last year gathering community input, holding 30 meetings and events in multiple languages.

From those meetings grew the exhaustive plan with a goal to encourage diversity, reknit the neighborhood with the rest of the city, build a community that is bicycle and pedestrian friendly and that draws business as well as residents, senior city planner Barbara Frommell said.

Mixed-income skeptics

Some in the community are skeptical about creating a mixed-income neighborhood, fearing that low-income residents won’t be welcome.

“I have mixed thinking,” said Asnake Deferse, an Ethiopian immigrant whose family has lived in Sun Valley Homes public housing for three years. “It is low-income living with middle class. Sometimes low income is going to be blamed because they don’t have jobs. If something happens, (the middle class) will point to the low-income people. That is scary. That is my concern.”

Chris Parr, development director with the Denver Housing Authority, said that won’t happen. The low-income housing will be permanent and won’t be segregated in slums.

Presently, the Housing Authority owns 30 acres in Sun Valley and has about 300 units, residences that were built in the 1940s and look like Army barracks.

The plan is to raise federal funds to build newer, higher-quality housing for lower-income residents. The Housing Authority has been lauded nationally for its mixed-income projects in Denver, including the South Lincoln Redevelopment project in the La Alma/Lincoln Park neighborhood.

“At the end of the day, what we develop and put into place is called a city,” Parr said. “It’s the urban core. It is basically city life where you have various income levels living within blocks of each other and sometimes in the same complex. That happens all over the city all the time. That is what makes a great city and gives it character and uniqueness.”

The plan has been a long time coming, said Councilwoman Judy Montero, a passionate supporter of the project.

“The shift now is instead of building so much for cars, we are building communities for pedestrians and bicycles,” Montero said. “That’s why it’s so amazing. It does so much by creating and working with the neighborhood … and threading in all these other infrastructures like the river and the station stop and where that can take them. It is connecting Sun Valley to other things in the city and region.”

Room for development

Additionally, the area is going to have more developable property in the coming years. Xcel Energy plans to decommission its Zuni power plant by 2016 and remove its fuel tanks. And the Lakewood Gulch and the South Platte River have shrunk the floodplain, opening up more land.

Jeremy Nemeth, chairman of the Department of Planning and Design at the University of Colorado Denver, said the city’s efforts to map out a future for the neighborhood will make it easier to attract developers.

“If this was just ‘let’s redevelop Sun Valley’ and there was no city involvement, I can’t imagine developers would want to get in,” he said.

But the city is already planning several “transformative projects,” including realigning 13th Avenue to provide a direct connection between Federal and downtown Denver, build a new riverfront park and play fields and create a “stadium festival street” along Lower Colfax in front of Sports Authority Field meant to attract shops and cafes.

But as far as creating a mixed-income neighborhood, that may be more difficult, he said.

“To try to create that mix in a way that doesn’t produce resentment among current residents and attract people that developers want, it’s very hard for me to point to a place in the country where that has been seamless and successful,” he said.

Businesses excited

Nevertheless, business owners in the area say they are looking forward to the change.

Adrianna Abarca, co-owner of the Mexican food manufacturer Ready Foods that has facilities in the neighborhood, said having a mixed-income neighborhood is the right thing to do.

“My greater fear is to have it totally become gentrified, like the whole Commons area around REI,” she said. “It’s all single people. I have a bigger fear of gentrification and not having diversity and having that be totally eliminated. In the end, everyone is better off to be more mixed together.”

Dave Keefe, who has owned Brooklyn’s near the stadium for 30 years, said his business struggled after the Pepsi Center was built and took away the crowds who attended games at the old McNichols Arena.

“We had to become a neighborhood bar,” he said. “So, yes, we are for the redevelopment. You have to get people into the area. Right now it’s hard to get in and out. If you don’t know where you are going, you get nailed by trains, the river. They need to get neighborhoods in here, lofts, condos and stuff like that. This is a great plan.”

Jeremy P. Meyer was a reporter and editorial writer with The Denver Post until 2016. He worked at a variety of weeklies in Washington state before going to the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin as sports writer and then copy editor. He moved to the Yakima Herald-Republic as a feature writer, then to The Gazette in Colorado Springs as news reporter before landing at The Post. He covered Aurora, the environment, K-12 education, Denver city hall and eventually moved to the editorial page as a writer and columnist.

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